Viral Marketing - Another Set of New Clothes for the Emperor?

fingal asks: "I've recently started working for a company who has decided that viral marketing is The Way Forwards. I've got mixed feelings about this. As the sysadmin who has to deal with the aftermath of hosting our own stuff and dealing with the inevitable congestion associated with the (rapidly increasing) size of attachments that are routinely moved about, it just winds me up. On the other hand - I very much enjoy checking out what people are up to (except when they email it to me and I'm on a dial-up...), but I don't think that I've ever actually bought anything as a result. What does everyone think about about this (either from the viewpoint of a consumer, provider or infrastructure engineer)?" Here is a better definition of the term "viral marketing". What are your thoughts on this subject?

Comments

You don't know what viral marketing means

[flockofseagulls]

It has nothing to do with big email attachments or recipe sites.

What are you talking about?

[stefanlasiewski]

Huh? You need to clarify the definition.

In my mind, "Viral Marketing" is similar to "word-of-mouth" marketing. It's one of the oldest marketing schemes around.

You promote products to your customers, and then your customers promote the product to their friends via email ("Hey Barbara, I get this newsletter from xxx.com, and I think you'll find it useful), over coffee ("Oh, I found this great new website...", whatever.

It has very little to do with large email attachments. It's all about focusing on a small, tight-knit community who communicates alot, and then exploiting those communication channels. Word of mouth.

My former employeer (A large new-parent oriented website with millions of unique visitors a month) was the queen of viral marketting. They probably had the best word-of-mouth promotion of any site on the planet. Why? Because new parents communicate alot. They NEED information, and want to help out the other new parents as much as possible, and end up promoting the website just like they say "Have you checked out Penelope Leach's new baby book?". Big bang for the marketing buck.

So, in this case, viral marketing was working pretty good, but not good enough, because some of us got laid off a few months ago.

Re:What are you talking about?

[fingal]

It has very little to do with large email attachments. It's all about focusing on a small, tight-knit community who communicates alot, and then exploiting those communication channels. Word of mouth.

I would totally agree with you except in cases when the the incentive to forward the email on to another load of people is the payload of the email (rather than some direct transaction with the company (as you mentioned elsewhere with bribes). If an email forwarded item is going to become self-sustaining then it either has to forward itself (in the case of a software virus) or it has to provide the host with an excuse to pass it on to new folk. The more folk that it can interest, the greater the chances of actually reaching the coverage that it desires. If it "dies" (ie is not forwarded on to anyone else) as soon as it arrives at a person who is not directly interested in the product then it will by definition be less sucessful. Therefore an email that carries an attachment that is entertaining in it's own right will, by definition, provide better dispersion than an item that directly narrows down the target audience to the product.

Now, what I was trying to ask when I posted the story was (and judging from the general posts so far I failed miserably to get my point across) was: Is the creation of marketing material that is so far removed from the target product to become an interesting thing in its own right a valid model for doing business?

OT: Richard Stallman and open source software

[Anonymous Coward]

> GNU General Public License, a great Richard
> Stallman's contribution to open source software

Please! Richard Stallman has NOTHING to do with open source movement! This was a great contribution to FREE SOFTWARE movement, a movement started in 1983 by Richard Stallman, which was later bastardized by Eric Raymond, after ripping off the Debian Free Software Guidlines and publishing them as "Open source definition" in 1998! Why the fuck no one is paying attention to this issues?! You just sicken me with your endless ignorance!

What the Fuck?

[bellings]

I'm assuming this entire incoherent article is just an attempt at a viral advertisement for your website.

Did you get paid to submit it to Slashdot every day until some editor came back from lunch stoned and accepted it, or did your company's marketing department just give up and slip Cliff $100 worth of ditch weed and tijuana hookers to post this trite?

A rose by any other name

[Krueger Industrial S]

is still Spam

Just as Multi-Level Marketers try to hide behind other names (Network Marketing, etc), viral marketing is just another name for Spam.